Slashdot Mirror
ISO Approves OOXML
sTeF writes in, with the hope that this is an April Fools joke. Doesn't look like it though. An article up at Intellectual Property Watch claims they have obtained a document (PDF) enumerating the vote after Microsoft's OOXML won ISO standard status.
Sounds like you're having difficulty accepting defeat and are engaged in spin.
...").
It's like the five stages of grief:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
You're at stage 1 right now, trying to spin defeat into victory, and are already headed to stage 2 ("I'm really fucked off about
BTW, others have already implemented OOXML (the original ECMA version, though updates will be made for the new ISO version), but MSO will have no problem competing on features, UI, integration, enterprise solutions, office dev platform, etc.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I keep seeing this charge. Can you provide specifics? Yeah, I know about the Sweden incident last September, but MS reported that incident to the authorities themselves, and OOXML failed the September vote (to much rejoicing of slashdotters). But what about this new vote? Where is the evidence of "approval was purchased"? It seems to be a charge much bandied about around here without a shred of proof.
Why can't you accept the fact that OOXML failed the September vote due to technical problems, ECMA/MS addressed those problems, and thus removed any real reason to reject OOXML in the new vote. Or is it that the opposition in reality had nothing to due with technical problems, but was rather politically driven, and so even a 100% pristine "perfect" spec still wouldn't pass muster with the likes of you because of the politics?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
The surveys that Microsoft cares about tend to look more like these:
The Year of Office 2007
Microsoft SharePoint taking business by storm
Microsoft Q2 2008 by the Numbers
Top Operating System Versions Share Trend for May, 2007 to March, 2008, Top Operating System Share Trend for May, 2007 to March, 2008 , Operating System Market Share for March, 2008
In the Net Applications stats you'll find Vista winning a healthy 14% share of the market and Linux neatly sandwiched between Win NT and Win 98 with a 0.61% share.
Those international standard bodies could not care LESS about what OSS zealots think. They're not relevant to their operations and existance.
What actually happened in this whole OOXML situation was OSS zealots making fools of themselves, in front of the entire market. Every smart person realised that it was just a silly, childish "omg, let's fight hard to screw microsoft on this one" festival of crappy activism.
there's no technical reason to reject OOXML
Hahaha. That's a hoot.
Yes a thousand or some such problems have been partially or completely improved during this ridiculously brief superficial joke of a fast-track process. But that is only because there were five to ten thousand or more errors and flaws in this hastily and carelessly slapped together OOXML proposal.
Hell, some of the "fixes" applied in the last vote in fact BROKE the OOXML document in. In this this total joke of a process they forced blind "yes-no" votes on many hundred "fixes" to many hundreds of errors and flaws of this absurdly broken document without permitting any chance to analyze and discuss those proposed "fixes", and some of those "fixes" were contradictory or otherwise themselves broken. It has merely been a quickly first pass at assembling a laundry list of problems, and we have had an absolutely half-assed first pass at fixing the errors of that first pass laundry list.
Claiming that "there's no technical reason to reject OOXML" is a total joke. Either you are astroturfing, or you don't actually know anything about the technical state of OOXML and for some bizarre reason you have total blind faith in the the Microsoft party line of gross misrepresentations and outright lies.
I am a programmer. I have looked at parts of this OOXML document. There are still endless technical problems with it. The normal non-fasttrack ISO process would take years and years struggling to rework this OOXML mess up to par for an ISO standard.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"Of course, the Czech Republic comments covered only a tiny fraction of what was wrong with the standard, so the actual improvement was, relatively speaking, fairly negligible - even when you take all the comments submitted by all the countries, there's still far more things left unfixed than there are things that have been fixed. (There just wasn't enough time to find everything.) It looks like several of the partially-resolved issues are still likely to break interoperability, too. To be honest, saying that "OK, we can approve it now" based on this seems a bit iffy..."
So are you saying that you agree with AlgorithMan (the guy to which I responded in my previous post) that all countries that switched from NO to YES took "bribes"? To be more specific, are you accusing the Czech Republic, and even more specifically, Jiri Kosek (the Czech Republic's expert, the one who wrote the evaluation I cited in my previous post), of taking a bribe? Remember, bribery is a two-way street. Many of you throw around accusations of Microsoft "bribing" people but in so doing you're also accusing the experts and government reps of accepting these bribes. I would like to know if you really want to go there (accusing real people (not just Microsoft or "governments", but real people), of taking bribes without any evidence to back up such an accusation).
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000